Creativity

Art / Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

Another genius business idea: Communities refurbishing their subway platforms

Here's another post in my Genius Business Idea series. My goal in this series is to show how entrepreneurial opportunities are everywhere, contrary to the common myth people who say they want to start a venture but don't: that they haven't found a great idea yet. This project is challenging, more for bureaucratic reasons than technical, but there is ample precedent of people overcoming similar challenges in New York. Read below for a list of examples. If you don't live here, I expect you'd have an easier time than we would. This one came from talking to a city employee tasked with improving neighborhoods in New York. While bureaucratic approval would be difficult, there is plenty of precedent for beautifying many shared public spaces, especially…

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October 27, 2014
Art / Creativity / Leadership

Dustin Hoffman on feeling understood about a passion and how it helps a leader

This clip wonderfully shows the effects of feeling understood about a passion---that is, a powerful emotion. You see how cathartic it feels for the person sharing the passion and how important it is for someone leading the person. Context: In a long interview, Dustin Hoffman is talking about the challenges of growing up under a stern father and how he escaped through movies, which evolved into acting. He starts to talk about how his exploring and understanding his relationship with his father and unexpectedly realizes he is revealing something deeply personal about his preparation for that role. What to look for: When he realizes the depth of what he's revealed, try to gauge his emotion. Would you say he more likes or dislikes the feeling?…

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October 3, 2014
Creativity / Education

Why I don’t think much of TED talks

Do you watch TED talks? Many people seem to love them. Here's why I don't think much of them: When I ask people if they find TED talks inspirational, most people who watch them say yes. When I ask people to point out specific changes to their lives---that is, to describe what the talks inspired them to do---almost nobody can name action they've taken. Most changes people have taken have seemed minor to negligible. I'm sure many people have acted on their feelings of inspiration, I just suspect a small fraction of the number who watch. I've concluded TED talks give the feeling of inspiration without actually inspiring. I don't fault the talks or the speakers. I find many of them impressive. The format is…

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September 1, 2014
See Joshua Spodek at Cole Haan, Flavorpill, and General Assembly’s Inspiration Workshop, September 6
Art / Awareness / Creativity / Education / Events / Exercises / Leadership

See Joshua Spodek at Cole Haan, Flavorpill, and General Assembly’s Inspiration Workshop, September 6

Post-event update: see a write-up and video of the event here -- http://flavorwire.com/477424/history-begins-here-starting-a-legacy-in-nyc. Everybody who attended it seemed to love it. My event had a packed room with enthusiastic participants. I made several great connections at my event and the others I attended. I hope to see you next time. See me next weekend The event is free and there's lots more than just me presenting on leadership. My part is next Saturday, September 6, 12:30pm-2:30pm. I'll talk on leadership and lead attendees through some exercises to develop leadership skills. People describe more workshops as inspiring and I teach others to inspire (though you have to practice). Click on the image to RSVP and for all the logistics.  

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August 29, 2014
Art / Creativity / Freedom / Humor

Thoughts on reading Steve Martin’s memoir, “Born Standing Up”

I read and recommend Steve Martin's memoir, "Born Standing Up." He writes honestly and concisely. He persevered through a challenging life. Unlike many people we admire, he didn't overcome obstacles that befell him. My list of inspirations on my "Resources and Inspirations" page includes three big ones for me who overcame outside challenges that they couldn't have foreseen and have to handle---Victor Frankl, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Mark Zupan. Overcoming challenges is hard and brings out the best in some people. Steve Martin's challenges came from inside. He lived his passion without compromise---as challenging a task as overcoming an injury. As a comedian, that meant playing five to ten shows a week for years to empty rooms, handling hecklers, and barely making ends meet. It meant…

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June 14, 2014
Art / Awareness / Creativity

Two posts by others I recommend

Two great posts by others force me to break my pattern of sticking to original work. The first is that if you know me you know I love Calvin and Hobbes. The first new work by Bill Watterson in a long time appears here -- "Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did." The second is one of the best pieces on meditation I've read -- "My journey with meditation. And, why you should do it too." It's simple, just talks about the practice without needlessly referring to the supernatural or religion, and connected it to life. The 'should' in the title got me to read it so I could find flaws in it, since…

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June 7, 2014
Rejected lately (or ever) and looking for encouragement?
Art / Creativity

Rejected lately (or ever) and looking for encouragement?

Don't know who Mr. P. Hewson of Dublin, Ireland is? Read the following rejection letter to him and his band to see one of the great rejection letters of all time. (Hint: his band has sold over 150 million albums, the band won 22 Grammy awards, and Rolling Stone magazine ranked them in the top 25 greatest artists of all time). If you didn't figure it out, RSO records summarily rejected Bono and his band U2 in 1979, about a year before their first album, Boy. You know the rest. So if you've been rejected lately, put yourself in the camp of Bono and U2. For that matter, the Beatles, too, who were rejected in 1962 with "We don't like their sound, and guitar music…

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June 3, 2014
Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 2: how to improve
Awareness / Creativity / Freedom / Nature / Tips

Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 2: how to improve

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, None but our self can free our mind. -- Bob Marley, Redemption Song Context How do you move from living reactively, like in this graph, where you can't help but react to any intense motivation: To living aware and non-reactively like this, where you are aware of many motivations but don't feel compelled to react blindly to any? That change brings freedom. It comes from raising awareness and lowering compulsion to act on it. How to raise awareness by increasing your sensitivity to your motivations A motivation being subtle---that is, not intense---doesn't mean it's unimportant. On the contrary, often your most important motivations are subtle ones. How many people want to write books, paint, and so on, but never do…

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May 28, 2014
Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 1
Creativity / Freedom / Models / Nature / Visualization

Visualizing reactivity and freedom, part 1

Think of a time you reacted blindly. Did it go well? How do you feel about leaders who react without thinking or intuition? You don't want to react blindly---the opposite of leadership, since it means you're reacting to someone else, or unpredictable events in your environment, which I call blowing in the breeze. Most people understand the term "reactive" vaguely, so they can't do much about it. I find visualizing complex ideas helps me understand them. Visualizing reactivity Context: at any moment many things in your environment, body, and mind call for your attention and create motivations. You feel hunger and thirst, your boss yells at you, your kids yell for your attention, you remember you have to do your taxes, you want to go…

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May 27, 2014
113,792 points in 2048 with the 8192 tile!
Creativity / Humor

113,792 points in 2048 with the 8192 tile!

After the game in the picture below I couldn't help myself emailing a friend about it the following. I don't know if I'm more proud or ashamed and if it's from the high score or the poem. Look on my high score, ye mighty, and despair! You met a geek from an antique land Who emailed: "Sixteen small and colored numbered tiles Stand on my screen. Near them, on my Aeron, Half sunk, my procrastinating self sits, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that two-oh-four-eight well my time wasted Which yet passes, composing this poetic note, The hand that moved tiles and the eyes turned red: And on the screen these words appear: 'My name is Spodek, player of pointless…

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May 24, 2014
Creativity / Humor / Leadership

How to win over a stadium of 20,000 angry African soccer fans

"You! You cannot do that here!" A voice in a stadium of 20,000 people told my friend he was breaking a rule. The man yelling pointed at my friend and sounded angry. A man next to the first saw what he was pointing at---my friend---and pointed and yelled he couldn't do that here too. Then another, another, and another. Soon a whole section was pointing at him, angrily yelling at him he couldn't do what he was doing. But what was he doing? My friend didn't understand what was going on. He and two of his friends had decided to go to their first soccer game in Dar es Salaam, where they'd lived for the better part of a year. They had barely walked in…

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April 22, 2014
Art / Creativity

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On a note of remembrance, many years ago, when I lived in Paris, my friend volunteered at the English Language Library for the Blind there. She told me they valued American accents in the readings there and asked if I would read a book for them. I agreed and decided on Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who died yesterday. The librarian suggested starting with a shorter book, but I loved the book so much I couldn't pick another. This was about 1990. I had read the book a year or two before, my father's hardback copy. Only after starting it did I realize how much longer it takes to read a book out loud than silently and how much time…

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April 18, 2014
Creativity — The Series
Art / Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Tips

Creativity — The Series

The series of posts below covers creativity, mainly exploring counterproductive mainstream myths about it. I used to view "creativity" as vague, but a few sources dramatically and convincingly changed my perspective. One was a class at Columbia Business School called Systematic Creativity in Business, by Jacob Goldenberg. Creativity being systematic was designed to appear in the course name as a contradiction, but isn't when you understand the material. His book is great and covers the material well, though the tone is academic. The other is Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius, which revolutionized my views on creativity. Mainstream ideas on creativity try to make the topic seem romantic — like that Mozart was a creative genius beyond ordinary human capability and he worked in ways…

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March 30, 2014
See Coco & Breezy at NYU Monday!
Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Events

See Coco & Breezy at NYU Monday!

If you don't know Coco & Breezy, they are two rising stars with their own fashion line. Check out their page here. They started their company in their teens, moving to New York City from Minneapolis and have been growing since. Here's an overview from the event announcement for their engagement Monday at NYU: The Entrepreneurship Special Interest Housing Floor invite entrepreneurs and fashion-minded alike to attend an evening with Coco & Breezy Corianna and Brianna, also known as Coco and Breezy, are the founders of a cutting-edge sunglass and fashion brand based in New York City that aims to reach new fashion heights and introduce fashion connoisseurs all over the world to their unique sense of style and original accessories. Coco and Breezy designed…

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March 27, 2014
A human perspective on quantum gravity
Creativity / Education / Nature

A human perspective on quantum gravity

You've probably heard or read about the experimental discovery of gravity waves, a major and historic discovery in science with widespread implications, in the news lately. Understanding those implications is difficult. So is understanding the experiment. What's not hard to understand is the effect of hearing about the experimental results on someone who does understand its meaning and who explored this part of nature for decades. This video shows the unrehearsed reaction of two such people with a friendly surprise breaking of the news. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlfIVEy_YOA I notice most their interest in nature---specifically understanding what the experiments observed. I suspect to them, looking at what most people see as impossible-to-decipher equations and graphs, the data is like seeing deeper beauty of nature. I expect they feel…

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March 19, 2014
Creativity / Education

Meeting my fourth Nobel Prize winner

Sorry no big insight today, but I couldn't help note that in attending a talk by Joseph Stiglitz and participating in the question and answer afterward, I got to interact with my fourth Nobel Prize winner. I met more of them when I studied physics, in particular studying with one. I also got to be friends with a Professor who had been hired by one of the other laureates in the department specifically to work on hard problems---one of the major prize-winners, who could have won it twice---and then was there when another professor was awarded the prize. I'm probably just bragging. And to say I met him might overstate our interaction. But Stiglitz's talk was great. He knew his material and presented it simply…

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March 8, 2014
Art / Creativity / Education / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

The value of entrepreneurial skills for artists and vice versa

Pyragraph Magazine just published a piece I wrote, "The Value of Entrepreneurial Skills for Artists," on how I hustled (a term that for me in entrepreneurship means only positive things) my way into a prestigious teaching gig at NYU while creating a big public art work. I loved and benefited from each. Neither opportunity could stand on its own, but both together worked. And the city, the school, and the students benefited. You don't have to make art to see how you can apply the story to your life. Check out the story.

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March 6, 2014
Art / Creativity / Tips

Show, don’t tell

I don't often find myself at a loss for words, but my mind was racing too fast to pick anything to come out. I looked out the cafe window at the people bundled in their coats, Spring still weeks away. In front of an agent I had recently started working with on the early draft of a few chapters the book I'd hurried to finish in the last few days said the words "show, don't tell," which she had just explained to me was rule number one of writing. And that my writing was all tell and hardly any show. I had hoped I would have gotten at least to rule number two. She eased the pain by explaining it became rule number one not…

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March 4, 2014
Art / Awareness / Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Events / Leadership

What you can learn from a film director

The reason we on the Distinguished Leaders Committee of Columbia Business School's alumni club booked a director for this evening's talk was something one of last year's speakers, Rita McGrath, said. If you're near New York City, I recommend you come (click here for details of location and how to sign up, you don't have to have graduated from Columbia to join). She pointed out that as people work at companies for shorter times, their personal networks that they maintain become more important. That is, someone you hire in their twenties today may not have worked at any company for even a year, yet the most effective ones will have something generations before didn't: a personal network of people at diverse places they can call…

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February 27, 2014
Art / Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Events / Leadership

See “The Business of Movies with Director Corydon Wagner, winner Golden Lion Cannes 2012” February 27, 6-8pm

I will be presenting Golden Lion Cannes Award-winning Director Corydon Wagner February 27, 6-8pm. As a successful entrepreneur who leads projects with billions of dollars at play, he will present what business leaders can learn from directing and producing film. Sign up here. Below is the announcement text with a link to Wagner's page. Business today forces leaders to form and lead teams under difficult conditions, even where few team members have worked together before, yet all have to create world-class quality on which billion-dollar campaigns hinge. The film industry has worked in those conditions since its start and business leaders can learn from it. Corydon Wagner, Cannes Golden Lion award-winning Director and co-founder of his production company, will describe the big picture and details of such…

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February 5, 2014
Art / Creativity / Entrepreneurship / Leadership

People who succeeded despite adversity, part 3: Superbowl Edition

[This post is part of a series on people who succeed despite adversity. If you don't see a Table of Contents to the left, click here to view the series, where you'll get more value than reading just this post.] Continuing my series on people who succeeded adversity, I'll start with deaf football player in today's Superbowl, as shown in these two videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HW51d5Om614 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQvB7FMkIWg Person Achievement Adversity Derrick Coleman First offensive deaf football player in the NFL, who said ""They told me it couldn't be done, that I was a lost cause. I was picked on and picked last. Coaches didn't know how to talk to me. They gave up on me. Told me I should just quit. They didn't call my name.…

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February 2, 2014
Creativity / Tips

Write a book! Feel your own book in your hands.

I can't tell you how good it feels to have your own book in your hands. I've been meaning to write that for a while -- since I got my first printed book from Book Patch. A short book costs less than ten dollars to print. From then on you'll always have a book you wrote. You can hold it, thumb the pages, show it to friends, get more copies to give away, and so on. If you're like me you'll keep improving it, talking to editors and designers to help. I'm sure parents will tell me since I haven't held a child of my own I've probably felt a small fraction of what they did. That doesn't detract from how good having your own…

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January 31, 2014
Art / Blog / Creativity / Freedom

The complete simplicity of T. S. Eliot

Martha Graham's words on discipline, conformity, and freedom influenced me enough that I quoted her in several posts. She quotes T. S. Eliot describing "complete simplicity (costing not less than everything)." Two of my posts on her are "A master speaks on creative expression" and "A model on the foundation of personal freedom." I had to look up the T. S. Eliot reference, so, in case you would too, I'll copy his poem below, followed by a few words of context and another "poem" to contrast it with. Actually, this is just the closing part of the longer Four Quartets. We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for…

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December 22, 2013
8 harmful consequences of confusing your beliefs with reality
Art / Blog / Creativity / Tips

8 harmful consequences of confusing your beliefs with reality

Many people make the mistake of thinking that some things they think are beliefs and others are not beliefs but facts. Or that they are just right. For example, if you ask them who they think might be the next President, they might say it could be Hillary Clinton. They'd say that was a belief because they can't prAove who will become the next President. They just have to wait until it happens. If you ask them what one plus one is they'll say two. If you ask them if that's a belief, they'll say no, they don't believe one plus one is two, it's a fact they know. What you believe isn't reality, it's your belief about reality Even if something is objectively true,…

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November 25, 2013

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